• Defending the indefensible turns out to be among the obligations of a husband
If you think you have issues in your life, let me welcome you to the circus that is my life, which clearly rivals the Mexican soaps on your TVs. I mean, La Tormenta (The Storm) or El nombre del amor (In the name of love), have nothing on yours truly.
I married my boss’ daughter and now the hens have come home to roost. There were already signs right from the beginning, but my love goggles were so thick I could see nothing out of them. There was the fact that Sgt Sophia, my wife, had only then reunited with her father, who happened to be my senior. In the picnic of their happy reunion, who was to come and crash the party but a pesky ant called Sgt Makini?
Then Sophia’s mother showed up, craving to be back in her daughter’s life and completing the picture of a happy family. And therein lies the problem.
While Sophia’s choice of a lover didn’t matter when she was struggling to find her path, her reunited parents suddenly settled the matter for her. She couldn’t marry a poor sergeant at a police post in a village called Jiji Ndogo that no one (not even my very well-read geography teacher) could locate on a map. They had better plans for their offspring.
What followed was a small parade of potential suitors presented to Sophia, one of whom turned up to be (potentially) her half-brother. Luckily for me, Sophia would have none of it and she elected to stay with her poor village boy in a traditional come-we-stay marriage since the chances of a happy traditional wedding were all but non-existent.
Her mother, not famous for staying still for too long, flew the coop with another one of her ex-lovers, leaving my boss, Inspector Tembo, devastated, and Sophia and I free to chart our life forward. Then came trouble. The DCI swooped in and accused Sophia of being on the lam for the gruesome murders of a man, his wife and two children back in Nairobi.
So far, my wife has done little to negate the evidence presented by the detective in charge. This has, however, not kept me from getting in trouble first with her, then with her father. By asking her to defend the allegations, she’s viewing me as an unsupportive husband, a malady that has spread toher father. I love Sophia, and I know I’m supposed to stand by her side at all costs, but I feel like her reluctance to comment on the matter means she’s hiding something from me.
My only recourse (or so I thought), was to involve her father, who I thought could make the whole thing disappear. I know, I know. As a policeman, I’m supposed to let the due process of the law run its course, but it’s my wife we’re talking about, folks. For her sake, I’ll gladly stand naked outside at night, covered in honey from head to toe, and not utter a peep as termites burrow tunnels into my bowels.
As it turns out, Inspector Tembo is mad at me for “thinking” that my wife could be guilty of something, and Sophia is mad at me for not “standing behind her one hundred per cent and ratting her out to her father”. If this isn’t a classic “stuck between a rock and a hard place”, I don’t know what is.
And now, as if all that isn’t bad enough on its own, Detective Gundua of the DCI came back today and arrested Sophia. Now I have to work on bailing her out.